


Carry That Weight - Fragmentia

by PazithiGallifreya



Series: Carry That Weight [7]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-10
Updated: 2016-11-24
Packaged: 2018-08-07 19:50:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7727596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PazithiGallifreya/pseuds/PazithiGallifreya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some bits and bobs too long to stuff into the Appendix of Carry That Weight.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Lily

**Author's Note:**

> I had not originally intended to post any of this stuff to Ao3 as none of it is "finished" work, but Yahoo seems intent on running tumblr into the ground. I don't anticipate that it will die swiftly, but I think in the long run, Ao3 will stick around longer.
> 
> They're not quite fics, just some very unpolished brain-vomit related to the "Carry That Weight" series that I may or may not some day expand upon if I ever have the time, energy and inspiration to do so. Some of it is just notes and meandering thoughts. The general paucity of tags is because I'm mostly putting these here for personal archival purposes and little else as I don't want them deleted when tumblr finally implodes under the weight of intrusive advertising, but feel free to read them and comment if you like, I enjoy chatting about my favorite characters of course.
> 
> (Also, if you are a Jily/Marauder fan who has somehow miraculously stumbled across this and feel the need to rip me a new one on principle for daring to suggest that in some alternate timeline Lily might have done something like this, save us both the time and hassle and don't bother. I have absolutely no intention of engaging with people who feel personal ownership of fictional characters they did not invent. They belong to J.K. Rowling and fan interpretations and alternate "universes" are just the ideas of other readers, no more and no less. You don't have to like or agree with every one of them and none supersede Rowling's original writing.)

How the hell could Severus Snape end up having a kid with Lily Evans, you might ask? They didn’t even talk to each other after their fifth year! Like, at all!

Damn good question, then, because it’s unlikely, but I wanted to do this silly alternate-timeline fic so basically here’s how I think it _might_ have gone down.

Firstly all we get in the books are really two snippets of Lily Evans & James Potter - “Snape’s Worst Memory” when they are like sixteen years old, and the night that the two of them died trying to protect Harry from Voldemort. Other than that, the rest is kind of just “headcanon” territory so there’s room to fill in a bit here and there.

So to start: Lily & James were _really_ young when they married. Barely eighteen years old if it’s really soon after leaving Hogwarts. 

One thing to remember - The human brain doesn’t even finish developing until your mid-twenties, particularly the frontal lobes which are critical for things like impulse control and decision making. Which is kind of obvious if you hang around any university frat house on the weekend. Obviously there are individual variations, some people mature faster than others and some take longer, some people just _never_ seem to grow up, but we’re talking about statistical averages here.

But my point is, they _really are_ still teenagers at this point. I’m not saying people who get married straight out of school are doomed to a terrible marriage because that is demonstrably untrue if you just look at the real world, I have a friend whose grandparents were 13 and 14 when they got married and stayed married until her grandfather passed away at the age of 80. 

But, there’s bound to be a few bumps in the road along the way, in any marriage when you get down to it.

So what the hell has that got to do with this crazy-ass story of mine? 

Let’s just suppose for a minute that, here you’ve got the Marauders, fresh out of school and dumped right in the middle of an _actual war_. It’s _stressful_. Sometimes you just wanna go out with the boys and blow off some steam, have a bit of fun, and forget for one evening that you might be dead by the end of next week.

So you’ve got this nineteen year old and his nineteen year old friends. James is married, he’s trying to do the mature, grown-up, family thing in the midst of a real horror. But then there’s Sirius and Remus and Peter, who are still very much bachelors and want to go out and have a good time. Maybe they’re kind of a bad influence. Maybe James has a bit too much to drink with them, maybe he gets just way too friendly with one of the women he meets while he’s out with his boys.

Maybe one of Lily’s friends sees all of this and lets her know the next day that hm maybe you need to talk to your husband. So she confronts him about it. He’s embarrassed and yea maybe ashamed too, and he knows he fucked up, but he’s also nineteen and maybe not the best in the universe at dealing with stuff even if he’s more mature than he was at sixteen, but he’s not a saint and nobody’s perfect.

So they get into a shouting match and say some things they’ll both regret later and Lily is heartbroken and _royally pissed off_ and doesn’t want to look at his stupid face. She leaves the house and goes back to her parents’ home to cool off on her own, but finds that they’re not actually home at the moment. Maybe they went shopping, maybe they’re visiting friends, whatever. She could unlock the door with her wand and go sit in the living room flipping channels on the tv but she’s restless and upset and, in the absence of anyone to talk to, just feels like moving.

So, she goes for a walk. Old habit sends her down the riverbank in Cokeworth on an old path that her feet follow almost without her direction. And who does she happen to meet? Severus Snape, leaning against the old oak tree they used to sit under as kids, what feels like a million years ago and another lifetime.

They haven’t spoken in a good three-plus years, not since that night he sat outside the Gryffindor dormitory and tried to apologize to her (but clearly had no intention of changing). 

She’s not ignorant, she knows what he is. But she’s a knotted-up ball of rage and frustration and she can almost squint her eyes and see him as he used to be in this old haunt of theirs, can almost crawl back in time a decade in her mind and find her old friend.  It’s a silly fantasy, but all too appealing at the moment.

He doesn’t believe his eyes when she walks up to him like a ghost out of the past. She doesn’t say much beyond “Hey, Sev” and he has no idea what to do. He’s not ignorant, he knows what she is.

Indeed, they are soldiers on opposite sides of a war, and he knows this. Part of him wants to reach for his wand, but he can’t do it. He just _can’t_. She might be here to kill him for all he knows, but he feels powerless to do anything about it. He cannot raise a hand against her any more than he can fly to the moon.

After a while, he just turns and walks away from her, fleeing from something he can’t cope with or understand. She follows him all the way back to Spinner’s End. He slams the door in her face, but doesn’t bother to lock it. He can’t lock her out, she’s _Lily_.

He flops down on the threadbare sofa and she comes inside and flops down beside him. She looks angry, she looks hurt. 

“Why are you here?” he asks.

She shrugs at him. She doesn’t even know why she’s here. She never came here when they were actually children. (They always met outdoors somewhere, or at Lily’s house. Sometimes Sev would just climb the tree outside of her window and talk to her from his perch there, but he never invited her over. She didn’t need to ask why, everybody in town kinda knew what went on at the Snape place after all, or at least thought that they did.)

“Go home, Lily.”

She shakes her head at him and stays firmly planted where she is. She can’t go home, not yet. She’s still too angry to see straight, much less deal with James right now. She doesn’t want to think about the war. She doesn’t want to think about Death Eaters, even if the logical part of her knows she’s sitting next to one. He doesn’t feel like something evil right now, though. He feels like her old friend, who used to point out shapes in the clouds and pinch flowers from the neighbors’ gardens for her to put in her hair.

They sit in a tense silence for ages, the sun sets and finally he just tells her one last time to _just go home, Lily_ and wanders up the staircase. She lays down on the couch as the last bit of sunlight disappears from the windows and the room grows dark. She finally nods off for a while on cushions that have the scent of ancient dust, but her dreams are unsettling and she awakens in the small hours.

She doesn’t even know why she’s here, but she’s still angry at James. She doesn’t want to think about him. She doesn’t want to think about how much she’s hurting at the moment, or how the angry part of her wants him to hurt, too. 

She gets up and looks at the hallway leading to the front door. She should go that way, go back to her parents. It’s very late, but she thinks they would understand. She’s not sure she wants them to, though. 

They’d tried to be supportive of her, after all, when she told them she was going to marry James, but it was obvious they weren’t altogether positive about it. “You’re both awfully young, dear, don’t you think? Mightn’t you wait a year or two to be sure?” They didn’t really understand though. She’d told them a little about the problems with her world, but hadn’t wanted them to worry. She never told them just how involved she & James were. She hadn’t told them she wasn’t sure they’d both still be _alive_ in a year or two.

The last thing she wants to hear right now is “I told you this was a bad idea.”

She goes the other direction, up the stairs. He’s sleeping on a narrow bed in a small room with peeling wallpaper, moonlight spilling through the cracked windowpane over him, making his naturally angular features appear even harsher. He’s lost weight since she last saw him, that much was clear. He’s always been thin; now her old childhood friend was positively gaunt. He murmurs in his sleep, his hands twitching as if trying to grasp something in his dream.

She doesn’t know why she does what she does next. Old memories, old feelings, fresh anger and hurt, an odd pang of regret and a stab of compassion for a man she has every reason to hate. 

She sits down on the edge of the bed beside him and brushes a strand of black hair away from his face. He stirs in his sleep but does not awaken immediately. She leans over him and kisses his brow softly. His dark eyes open a crack and he mumbles something, not quite awake. He gazes muzzily up at her, his cracked lips parted as his tongue darts out to moisten them.

She kisses him on the mouth, this time, and stretches out beside him, pulling her old friend into her embrace.

 

* * *

 

She has to tell him. There’s no avoiding it any longer. She’ll start showing eventually, if she doesn’t do something about it. She thinks about the tiny flicker of life inside her though, and the thought of “doing something about it” sort of makes her want to retch. She’s watched so many die in recent months, watched friends fall and watched them buried in the cold earth, and even the thought of it is just too much for her.

Sure, she knows witches who’ve gone through with it, and she doesn’t judge them for it. She knows everyone has their own situation, their own story, and their own way of dealing with things, but Lily? She just _can’t_ go through with it.

She cries sometimes when she’s alone. Eventually she tells Mary the whole sorry tale, and her friend is sympathetic but doesn’t really have an answer for her. She knows she has to tell him what happened, even if it means he never forgives her, even if it means he leaves her. He has a right to know. 

It’ll be obvious once the baby is born, anyway. They both have black hair but their similarity ends right there.

 

* * *

 

She finally does it, one evening when they are at home. They’d spent the last week together on difficult and dangerous Order business and the guilt gnaws at her. 

He’s stunned, at first. He just stares at her. He asks her why and she can barely answer. She was angry, she says, she was upset. He’d hurt her in that way and she’d wanted to hurt him back, and the guilt is like acid in her throat.

He walks out of the house and she doesn’t know if she will ever see him again. She cries all night by herself. 

She cries again in the morning, tears of relief when he returns. He tells her he will forgive her, but he doesn’t quite meet her eyes. 

They don’t mention it again for another month but suddenly nothing fits her right anymore and she collapses to the floor of their bedroom and cries when her favorite pair of jeans don’t button anymore and _oh lord what am I going to do, I am carrying the child of a Death Eater! What if he finds out?  
_

James leaves the house again without telling her where he’s going and doesn’t return for hours. He comes back with an old hand-written book that looks like it might fall apart if you breathed on it too hard. 

The inside of the cover was a plate marking it as belonging to the Black family’s personal library. She’s terrified he’s going to ask her to end the pregnancy and is even more terrified that she might just do it. 

He pulls her into his arms on the sofa and kisses her brow and shows her the page with the charm he’d found. “We’ll just hide him, Lily. We’ll just have to hide him. That bloody Death Eater will never suspect a thing. He’ll be _our_ child, love, only _ours_.”

 

* * *

 

Albus Dumbledore comes to them one night with a terrible warning. _You must hide!_

 

* * *

 

_“Lily, take Harry and go!”_


	2. Grandfather

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> How does Snape get along with the kids?
> 
> (This was done pre-Cursed Child and does not incorporate anything from the script, so no spoilers)

I’ve been thinking entirely too much about the idea of Snape as a grandfather, and also just his life in general _After_. But this Cursed Child thing’s come up and it’s hard to even imagine incorporating that into it based on some of the stuff I’ve heard (that I’m not going to repeat either cos I know not everyone following me is interested in hearing piecemeal spoilers)

but some thoughts completely excluding anything from that:

 

Here’s the main thing - Snape is not a naturally patient man. He can _be_ very patient, if he has a specific goal and can clearly spend decades working toward an end, but he is not patient with _people_. He’s patient in the way a stalking cat is patient, let’s just say that, but not so much in having great forbearance with other people’s annoying behavior. He’s sort of hyper-sensitive in a way and it doesn’t take much to put a dent in his personal bubble.

I think post-Carry That Weight he’s maybe learned to sort of chill out _just a bit_ and is significantly less stressed out in general. He’s not dealing with the demands of Voldemort. He’s not dealing with the demands of Albus Dumbledore either (and while I think he was a willing participant when it came to Dumbledore’s cause, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a source of immense stress).

Also the business with that damn hippie spell used by ~~Wizard!House~~ Smethwyck to fix a whole host of his injuries, maybe had a few other more generally soothing effects as well beyond just the weird proximal-empathy thing, or just the fact that hey, he’s got actual family now who actually seem to _care_ about him? Amazingly?

But, realistically, that’s not going to completely remake his entire temperament and personality. He is still _who he is_ , even if he’s managed to find a more stable emotional center in a lot of ways.

So, the three sproglets that Ginny and Harry end up having. I think JKR said somewhere that James Sirius is closer to his mother and Albus Severus is more like his father. 

In the context of my fic, Lily Luna is definitely Grandfather’s Favorite. But that doesn’t translate to not caring about the boys, because certainly he _does_. Quite a lot, even if he’s never really gonna be a cuddly Arthur Weasley type of grandfather.

But I imagine on a personality level, James Sirius probably drives Snape _up the freaking wall_ sometimes. He’s got a lot of that Fred-and-George (and Ginny) type personality and likes to get up to some mischief and generally just has a lot of excess energy. And when his horseplay and pranks are aimed at his grandfather? Oh lordy. 

I think Snape would really struggle with that. He _doesn’t_ want to hurt his grandson, and his old knee-jerk reflex of spitting insults at people who rattle his cage is something he just has to shove down into his shoes and walk on (which is something he’s had to learn to do anyway, because among other revelations, Headmistriss McGonagall’s decided she really doesn’t need a repeat of first-year Neville Longbottom crying into his cauldron and she moved him to NEWTS classes only for a damn good reason - Snape probably does a lot better as a teacher with older, more mature students who most importantly _actually want to be there and are interested in the subject_ but I digress). 

But more than just being irritated, it pains him in a way because even though he knows on an intellectual level that his grandson really is just trying to play with him, that it’s just his way, still it feels far too much like the kind of bullying he experienced growing up.

So sometimes he loses his temper. He doesn’t call his grandchild names but maybe he means to just tell him to _knock that rubbish off_ and it comes out at a volume he hadn’t really meant, and Jamie looks shocked and Snape immediately feels like an absolute dog but he really can’t help himself.

I’m guessing more than one occasion Snape literally just grits his teeth and leaves the room and James is like “wah? what happened?” until one day Harry finally pulls him aside and explains to him that, okay Jamie, maybe you need to save that kind of stuff for your brother and your friends at school because Grandfather does not enjoy that kind of play and you’re actually _hurting him_ and it takes a while for Jamie to understand that not everyone appreciates something he thinks is just good fun, but it’s really something he needs learn anyway.

Albus though? He’s quieter in general, and will sit and chop potion ingredients and wants to know how things work and why and it’s a vastly easier relationship all the way around. 

The only time he really gets Snape’s dander up is when he lets his brother pull him into his shenanigans but I think Albus starts getting doubts on his own much earlier and wonders if maybe it’s actually upsetting his Grandfather more than Jamie thinks and pulls back from actually participating, even if he doesn’t quite have the confidence to tell his older brother off for it. He’s secretly relieved after his dad gives his brother that talk.

Lily Luna, though? They’re two peas in a pod pretty much from the get-go. She stakes her claim on her Grandfather as soon as she’s old enough to pull herself up and walk a little, and has no qualms about demanding to be picked up. He surprises himself when he finds he doesn’t really mind it.

Ginny was never too sure about Snape’s place in their family, and was kind of leery about him being around the kids for a long time. Not that she thinks he’d ever _harm_ them, but she remembers his sharp tongue well enough from school and is sort of subconsciously counting down the days until he finally blows his top and says something truly inappropriate to them and she’ll have to step in and limit his interaction with them. Harry doesn’t seem to be too worried about it and that fact alone is the only reason she doesn’t intervene preemptively.

And then one lazy Saturday when Lily Luna is maybe three or four years old, she gets back from an outing with the two boys and Harry’s flopped on the sofa reading a book and she asks where Lil is. “Upstairs with her grandfather” he says while turning a page and she gives him a dubious look and makes her way to her daughter’s bedroom not sure what she’s expecting to find.

There the two of them are, sitting on a blanket on the floor having a “picnic” with Snape seated cross-legged with a look of mild suffering on his face, right between Lily Luna’s stuffed lion and the baby doll her grandma gave her for Christmas last year.

Yea, forget dark marks, Snape might as well have “Personal Property of Lily Luna” tattooed on his forehead because he’s _hers_ in a way neither Voldemort nor Dumbledore could ever have hoped for. Everyone else thinks it’s both kind of strange and, when he’s not within earshot, kind of _hilarious_ that this toddler apparently has taken possession of this grumpy, ratty old ex-Death Eater. 

He learns to live with it.


	3. Grandkids

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just a general description of James Sirius, Albus Severus and Lily Luna's appearance in the Carry That Weight AU, as Snape's grandkids (because none of my drawings seem to turn out anymore, alas....)

James Sirius has Ginny’s warm amber-brown eyes and a few freckles but Harry’s black hair and he’s kind of stocky like his uncle George and strong as an ox and ends up as a beater for Gryffindor in his fourth year. He ends up a few inches taller than both of his parents but nothing like the gangling giraffe that Albus grows into once he finally hits his growth spurt, around the end of his fifth year. 

Albus still has those bright green eyes like his father and his grandmother and his great-grandfather (Evans) had, but is basically the most awkward Slytherin stringbean nerd you can imagine as a teenager, constantly tripping over his own feet. He keeps his hair short because he gets annoyed at comparisons to his dad and his grandfather but, alas, there’s nothing he can do about the nose. Eventually Albus is not only taller than both of his parents but a clear inch taller than his grandfather by the time he finishes Hogwarts, easily as tall as Uncle Ron, and moves fairly suddenly from down in the front with his sister to the back row in family pictures, jammed between Uncle Ron and Grandfather Snape.

(James is always trying to egg him into throwing dad over his shoulder because _c’mon it’ll be funny Albus_ but he’s too shy. But one day he picks his Grandfather up in a bear-hug and nearly gives the poor man a heart attack.)

Lily Luna looks a lot like Ginny with brown eyes and freckles, but with that thin, tapering Prince jawline and there’s a bit of curl to her hair (that eventually darkens from a bright red to a warm auburn) that nobody can explain. She’s also tall for a girl and by the time she’s sixteen likes to annoy her dad by hopping off the Hogwarts train and standing on tip-toes and kissing him on the forehead and calling him her favorite elf. 


	4. Hogwarts Professors: New Faces

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Profiles of some OC's I cooked up for "Carry That Weight" and its sequels to fill in gaps in the Hogwarts staff roster

For this series, I introduced, at least in passing if not in the narrative, some new Hogwarts professors to fill in where canon left off. A few notes on these new Hogwarts staff members:

 

Jean MacDougal - Defense Against the Dark arts

 

A Scottish half-blood. She worked for Gringotts as a curse-breaker for decades, and eventually retired. It didn't take her long to get bored with her retirement, however, and after seeing the position advertised in the Daily Prophet, decided it might be amusing to apply for the position. She hadn't really expected to get an interview, knowing quite well that her salary demands were completely unreasonable. Once she met with the headmistress, however, she found herself suddenly taking the possibility seriously. Minerva McGonagall proposed a compromise - take the position as a part-time post, teaching the first five years only and with no requirement to remain in residence or take on after-hours duties. She accepted the position, thinking it would be something to pass a bit of time for a year maybe, but found herself renewing her contract each year for some damn fool reason.

A woman with a somewhat peculiar sense of humor and no natural affinity for working with children and teens, she's not greatly favored by the students, but neither is she unfair or unreasonable for the most part, just rather demanding. The more serious students tend to get on well enough in her class and mischief-makers soon find it's generally not worth the trouble.

 

* * *

 

 

Marina Patiño-Williams - Muggle Studies

 

An Argentinian muggle-born. She taught muggle children in her native country for many years, but her British muggle husband's parents began developing some health issues as they got older and he wanted to move back to be nearer them and able to help them. She wasn't terribly happy with the move, but settled in as well as she could. Although the couple have no children of their own, Patiño-Williams is fond of them. She wasn't sure how well she'd cope with an older age group than what she was accustomed to, and a subject she knew from life experience but not necessarily from a more academic angle. She had some ideas about teaching the subject that weren't necessarily the traditional way of going about it, however, and McGonagall decided to hire her and see how things went.

Compared to some of her predecessors, she worked less from the Ministry-issued textbook and focused more on broader culture and technology with a less condescending attitude all the way around, and a lot more hands-on material. The students seemed to respond positively, including some of the pureblood students who had never been exposed to muggle music, literature or art prior to entering her classroom. It took a while for her to convince the headmistress to let her teach muggle technology with practical demonstrations, and it required leaving the castle to find a place where electronic gadgets would even work, but a rented space in Hogsmeade worked out quite well in the end. Getting the muggle-born students to _not_ prank their pureblood counterparts by convincing them to lick the end of a battery was one issue she hadn't anticipated...

 

* * *

 

 

Archibald Wright - Potions

 

A British half-blood. He's a former Hogwarts student himself and was in Ravenclaw house. After graduating, he took a job with St. Mungos brewing stock antidotes and other common potions that the hospital requires a steady supply of. Ten years later, he saw an advertisement in the Daily Prophet for the Potions Master job at Hogwarts and applied with absolute confidence in his superior qualifications.

Of course, we know that neither McGonagall nor Snape were terribly impressed with his CV, but good luck convincing him that he isn't one of the preeminent potioneers in the country. He was rather perturbed to find out that the job was only for the first through fifth years, but figured he could work his way into the full-time position within a year or two, once the headmistress recognized his superior talent and intellect.

Years later, of course, he is still answering to Severus Snape and none too happy about it, although eventually being made head of Ravenclaw house (by default, as nobody else was interested in taking on the extra responsibilities after Flitwick's retirement) certainly left him feeling quite important.

 

(JK Rowling stated in an interview that she based Snape on several people, but at least partially on one chemistry teacher she'd rather disliked. Archie Wright, I will admit, is not terribly different on my end. He's not based on a single teacher, but rather an overall type that I always found both frustrating to learn from, and rather off-putting as people. He's not as utterly loathsome as Lockhart, but the character is definitely a sniffy, pretentious sort - the kind of academically gifted and intelligent individual who is entirely too self-satisfied about it, and also completely lacking in any kind of real creativity. These sorts are generally quite good at memorizing things and, in their own student days, getting good marks on exams, but good luck getting a single truly _original_ thought out of them. They are also easily threatened by students who stray in the slightest from their instruction and quite insecure underneath all the pomposity. They also rarely had any patience with students who had behavioral issues or special needs in my personal experience, and brooked no questioning of anything, ever. I never got along with these kinds of instructors very well, to say the least. He's not really a _bad_ person, but he's definitely meant to be kind of annoying, and Snape definitely has no use for him, and Lily Luna soon learns to just keep well clear of him for her own sanity's sake.)


End file.
